Shakespeare Performances in Stratford upon–Avon–and London, 1982–3

Summary

It would be hard to imagine a more perfect illustration of our current uncertainty about the interpretation of Shakespeare’s comedies than the productions of these plays presented at Stratford in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1982-3 season. Barry Kyle’s interpretation of The Taming of the Shrew opened in October 1982. John Caird’s Twelfth Night and Adrian Noble’s The Comedy of Errors followed in the April and August of 1983. If you rearrange the first and second of these productions you are left, not merely with a sketch map of contemporary disagreement, but with a sequential history of recent critical thought.

Twelfth Night was a thoughtful, often moving, production which could in principle have been offered in this theatre at any time in the last fifty years. On an exquisite picture stage, actors in Jacobean costume offered a coherently thematic reading of the play. The assumption upon which such performance relies is the widely held belief that Shakespeare’s comedies are serious poetic statements designed, in H. B. Charlton’s words, ‘to elucidate the moral art of securing happiness’. The director’s duty is to elicit such meaning from the text and, on this occasion, ‘A great while ago the world began’ and ‘Youth’s a stuff will not endure’ were taken as the keynotes of a strikingly melancholic interpretation.